A personal information manager is an application program that allows users to maintain and track information such as names, addresses and telephone numbers of businesses and personal and business contacts. The many different types of personal information managers currently available are known by generic names such as address books, contact managers, record keepers, organizers, and schedulers. Examples of information that may be stored in a personal information manager include a person's name, title, company name, company address, home address, telephone and facsimile numbers, e-mail address, scheduled activities, and notes. Commercially available personal information managers include "Maximizer" from Maximizer Technologies, "Act" from Symantec Corporation, "Janna Contact" from Janna Systems Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, "Schedule+" from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., USA, and "Lotus Organizer" from IBM Corp. of Armonk, New York, USA. Personal information managers may also be a part of larger application programs, such as, for example, the Netscape web browser from Netscape Communications Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., USA and Lotus Notes from IBM Corp. The personal information manager capability in the Netscape web browser is referred to as "Address Book" and in the Lotus Notes program is referred to as "C&S" or "Calender and Scheduler."
A significant problem with these and other conventional personal information managers is that the managers generally do not include an efficient or convenient mechanism for obtaining additional geographic information relating to the stored personal information. For example, a conventional personal information manager generally cannot easily obtain maps, directions, weather, yellow pages and other types of geographic information specific to a street address previously stored by the personal information manager. As a result, a user must use other techniques to obtain this information, such as re-entering the address into an on-line geographic information service or another software product. This is inefficient and a source of considerable inconvenience and annoyance for the user.